Across all industries and countries companies are extending their business models by adding subscription options for their products and services. This allows customers to consume them in a completely different way. Some of the reasons for going into subscription-based business models are:

Unfortunately the configuration, pricing and usage measuring of subscription based services tends to be complex. We all see this with our good old newspaper subscription which offers since ages options like “daily”, “weekend-only”, “first-month-free”, etc. but suddenly also includes “full”, “limited” or “pay-per-view” online versions.

With SAP Business ByDesign and it’s built-in standard webservice interfaces you can quickly integrate any kind of solution which manages the configuration, pricing and quote process for such a subscription based business model.

The demo shows only how to support intangible products without confirmation and delivery e.g. Postage, Software, Streaming, Lettershop. But of course it can be extended to support delivery of materials and service confirmation by a service employee by using the various other interfaces (e.g.sales order) that ByDesign provides out-of-the-box.

To implement the scenario and to run it on your ByD system you have to do the following steps.

1.Setup the SAP Subscription Billing System

Main step after you have received your tenant is the configuration of the subscription and its price determination with with a rate plan. In the demo we have setup a rather simple model with setup fee, recurring charge and block pricing. You can of course setup way more complex models.

2. Creation of quotes

After you have entered the first customer you can directly create a first quote, release it and optionally also add usage using a standard webservices or the user interface.

3. Integration using SAP CPI as middleware

The biggest effort is to build the integration flows which are orchestrating the standard webservices from SAP Subscription Billing and ByDesign. You can use SAP CPI or any other middleware for this. To do so you have to at least:

4 Comments

It was interesting it seems at Teched like the platform was forgotten. I may have had the only session on Cloud4Customer/bydesign. It almost seemed like the platform would be retired. But it is great news that SAP will continue to develop on the platform.

I’d rather say the ByD/C4C platform is beyond the hype and has reached “plateau of productivity”. It is proving since quite a while how efficient it can be adapted and extended. Maybe this is not visible to the outside and there is no big buzz around it but here at SAP we know very well the power of it.

Just take the example of how quick it was possible to switch the ByD UI to HTML5 or look at the more than 3500 partner add-ons installed just for ByD – the platform is the reason for this success!